Statistics Canada will no longer publish national marriage and divorce rates in order to save the federal government $250,000 per year.

OTTAWA — One good reason to stop fretting over the high rate of divorce is that Statistics Canada is going to stop telling us about it.

The federal agency published the national marriage and divorce rates for the last time a week ago, the result of a belt-tightening process across all government organizations that began three years ago.

“You never want to lose any data — partly because you don’t know what the future will bring and you love having long data series — but statisticians don’t rule the purse of the world,” said Ian McKinnon, who chairs the National Statistics Council, an advisory body to Statistics Canada. “So, sometimes they are forced to make choices.”

Statistics Canada decided to stop aggregating marriage and divorce data during the first strategic review of government spending in 2008, when selective departments and agencies were asked to identify savings.

Jeff Latimer, director of the Health Statistics Division at Statistics Canada, said that collecting marriage and divorce data fell into the bottom five per cent of spending priorities and so was cut in order to save about $250,000 a year.

Marriage statistics are still collected by the provincial and territorial vital statistics registrars and divorces are still recorded by the federal justice department, Latimer noted. Statistics Canada stopped combining them in 2008.

That means the calculations required to determine that 43.1 per cent of marriages are expected to end in divorce before the 50th wedding anniversary — according to the 2008 data released July 13 — are no longer being done.

“We will not be producing a national marriage or divorce rate; however, we will be able to collect information from other sources on family composition,” said Latimer, adding that both the mandatory short-form census and the now-voluntary national household survey include questions on marital status.

Toronto-based family lawyer Andrew Feldstein said statistics about marriage and divorces are not as useful as they once were.

“One of the problems with trying to analyze the divorce rate is that we are changing as a society. People aren’t marrying as often, but they’re living in extended common-law (relationships) for periods of time that really resemble marriage in almost every respect but for the piece of paper,” Feldstein said. “I think the calculation of that particular statistic may be becoming less relevant.”

Latimer said that if the decision is reversed or Statistics Canada receives additional funding — something he has been asking the justice department to consider — then the agency would be able to continue releasing the marriage and divorce rates without any gaps in the series because the data is still being collected in the same way.

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